Issue #61: 12 practical routes back to emotional base camp

A January Blues special in two parts. From doing the laundry to savouring an orange, how to keep your mental health in check and find balance right now – according to psychologists and writers.

I have to say, January, the nation’s least favourite month, is certainly living up to to its infamous reputation this year.

It doesn’t help that everyone is ill. Your mum, your best mate, your parents’ friend Howard from across the road, and, in a statistical marvel, every single commuter in your train carriage this morning. It’s either the zeitgeist-y cold ‘going round’, a throat full of invisible daggers, or the Covid strain threatening a comeback as unwelcome as Donald Trump’s to the White House.

Even I (typically blessed with saucily-strong immunity), was among the invalids last weekend. The trouble with being ill isn’t so much the piles of snotty tissues; it’s that it deters you from doing the basic practices that prop up your emotional wellbeing. Suddenly, the carefully-constructed foundations on which your everyday sanity is built come tumbling down like Jenga.

This is how that freefall played out for me. Because I was feeling lousy, I lounged around the house and steadily neglected to do my regular routines. According to my seven-day pill organiser (yes, I got the inspiration from my grandma), I forgot to take my supplements for a couple days, including the magnesium bisglycinate that has halved my anxiety since I started taking it a year ago. Then I forgot to do my morning meditation, which usually takes care of the rest of that anxiety. I then committed gastronomic self-harm, through accidentally on purpose ignoring my lactose intolerance.

The weather made it all worse, of course. Because, even if you’ve somehow escaped the plague, you still have to contend with this week’s sub-zero temperatures, which transforms going outside into a treacherous voyage (side note: has anyone else i. noticed an upsurge in balaclava wears and ii. been slightly tempted to buy one for themselves? I’ve had my eye on the Urban Outfitters number, hoping the cobalt blue shade will negate the burglar connotations…). Anyway, I fell short of my regular step count by a few thousand steps, and skipped my favourite Saturday morning yoga class. Instead, I moped on the sofa and scrolled near-strangers’ life decisions in a zombie-like haze.

The point that I’m getting to is, feeling crappy compounds feeling crappy. The minute you lose your baseline resilience, even putting one step in front of the other feels like a struggle. Your usual conscientiousness gets overridden by your lizard brain, which clears its reptilian throat and then demands, EAT ALL THE CHEDDAR! CANCEL YOUR VINYASA CLASS! PROCRASTINATE THAT DEADLINE! TEXT THAT PERSON SAVED ON YOUR PHONE UNDER ‘DO NOT TEXT’! BITE THE SKIN AROUND YOUR NAILS! ENGAGE WITH CONTENT PRODUCED BY A KARDASHIAN!

The only people celebrating, at this point, are the marketeers who conceived of Blue Monday, aka ‘the most depressing day of the year’, which occurred earlier this week on 13 January. They’re all high-fiving each other in a dingy office: ‘We manifested it, lads! Miserablest Monday ever!’

Staying at emotional base camp

What, amid the Jenga rubble, is the solution? Well! I have a modest proposal, which begins with significantly lowering our expectations for the next month or two. The way I see it, this probably isn’t the time to aspire for that happiness ‘peak’ (we’ll save that for spring/summer). Rather, it’s a time to rein in our ambitions a little and focus on maintaining those gentler platitudes: calmness, resilience, contentedness, a sense of routine.

It’s an approach endorsed by positive psychologists, who generally recommend aiming for contentment, over and above flirting with its flashier cousin, happiness. As Dr Elissa Epel, author of The Seven-Day Stress Prescription, recently told Stylist, ‘Chasing happiness is not the key to happiness: quiet contentment is a much better route to take.’ Personally, I like to think of it as ‘staying at emotional base camp’. But how to do it?